Being There as Socialism Unravels

Where the World Ended (1999)

The fence was opened and border guards stepped away, family and friends reunited. The euphoria of being able to move freely in Germany was palpable across eastern Europe. It did not take very long to realize that physical borders can be quickly dismantled, but conceptual borders would not be so easy to overcome. What makes a border? How are borderlands challenged by rapid social change? And how do people living in these liminal spaces respond to change? These questions prompted Daphne Berdahl to conduct field work in the former East Germany within a year after the “fall of the Wall,” settling in the village of Kella. ³

The study of borders and borderlands in anthropology concerns a range of topics, from the nature of space, the notion of territory, and the articulation of social identity to the conceptualization of culture itself. Time is also conceptualized in terms of discrete divisions, marking its passage by delineating historical periods and identifying momentous interruptions. The Friedliche Revolution was one such interruption. Berdahl’s study examines the nature of borders in multiple dimensions: the Cold War border between East and West, the border between West Germany and East Germany, the border constituting the Schutzstreifen (high security zone) in which the village was located and the rest of the Sperrgebiet (the restricted area adjacent to the international border), and, perhaps most consequentially, the conceptual and ideological border between socialism and capitalism.

Like other borderlands, the border I describe is characterized by an uneven and asymmetrical intersection of cultures. It is a site of cultural confrontation, articulation, and, to a large extent, penetration, where struggles over the production of cultural meanings occur in the context of asymmetrical relations between East and West. ⁴

All of these borders were revealed and manifested in the everyday lives and mundane practices of the villagers as they came to terms with the enormous changes thrust upon them.

When selecting a field site, Berdahl wished to find a region that straddled multiple borders. The village of Kella met these criteria. As a Catholic enclave among the predominantly Protestant communities of central Germany, the region had long been committed to maintaining a distinct regional identity. She also hoped to find a village that was located in the highly restricted 500-meter border zone (the Sperrgebiet) that flanked the western border of East Germany, an area not accessible to outsiders during the socialist period. Berdahl noted that the literature on borderlands had not studied this kind of territorial divide: “its impermeability (crossing it would have been a fatal act), and then its sudden disappearance.” ⁵ Kella was a unique site in a unique moment in time. Berdahl recounts a series of episodes that demonstrate the effects of extra-local processes in the unfolding dramas of small-scale events and practices.

The physical isolation of Kella was finalized in 1952, when an impenetrable fence was erected around its perimeter. Road signs were removed, and the village itself no longer appeared on maps, rendering the community invisible to the outside world. Physical isolation only heightened the significance of extra-local relations, most notably increasing interactions with Soviet border guards and signals to communicate with West German guards stationed across the field. Over time, people living in Kella reconciled themselves to the ugly fences, forging new paths for Sunday walks and keeping strictly to their own plots of land when hoeing at the border.

Berdahl understood the study of borders and boundaries as a means of conceptualizing social space and identity as they were manifested in daily interactions and negotiations. “People’s daily routines move them through a variety of contexts in which different forms of identity and identification are experienced, negotiated, and expressed.” ⁶ Fluidity and process are the defining characteristics of boundaries as lived, especially in a context in which so much seemed up for grabs. Rejecting the view popular in the 1990s that the transition constituted a radical break with the past, Berdahl preferred to conceptualize German reunification through the lens of liminality. ⁷ In rites of passage, the liminal period refers to the crucial phase in the ritual when the strictures of social life are rejected and the conditions of possibility widen immensely, allowing those caught “betwixt and between” to discard timeworn habits and imagine new worlds. It can be a time of creative thinking, but it is also a time marked by uncertainty and danger.

Dismantling the fence in Kella began a process of complex interactions among citizens of the newly unified nation. Decades of ideological banter spewed on both sides of the wall had produced dangerous caricatures that lived on and that were weaponized in every manner of social interaction. A crucial site to observe these encounters unfold was consumption. It was here that “Ossis” (Easterners) found out where they fit in the new moral hierarchy of German society. In these interactions, people recognized that the Wall had existed as much in their heads as in their fences. “Wessis” (Westerners) ridiculed Ossis for their lack of cultural fluency with shopping, and soon Ossis were subject to multiple scams in which their ignorance of mail-order gimmicks or their trust in clever door-to-door charlatans was fully exploited. Ossis faced a steep learning curve. Alone at home or with friends, they figured out how brands were differentiated by quality and price, and eventually they acquired the skills of savvy shoppers able to find the “best deal in town.” A more difficult lesson was the logics of consumer credit, domestic finance, and money management. Over time, the shiny patina of capitalist consumption faded and the harsh treatment and disdain Ossis experienced bred a new sense of pride in GDR identity. Nostalgia for East Germany (Ostalgie) gained wide appeal; socialist brands were proudly displayed and GDR films and music were sought out to enjoy once again. These sentiments for a past that never existed also constituted a discourse of mourning. The villagers of Kella had to reconcile themselves to life in a differently constituted space, having been irrevocably enclosed within an unforgiving capitalist economy that quashed alternatives.

Berdahl’s analysis makes clear that borders are more than their physical instantiation in guard towers and razor wire. The theoretical import of her work lies in emphasizing the cultural meaning of borders as a conceptual space and emotional terrain. Reconfiguring national boundaries requires that communities reassess their social imaginaries, and it challenges community members’ affective ties to each other.

Privatizing Poland (2004)

Privatizing state assets was a major topic in studies of the transition. For some, the issue was about moral redress; for others, their interest was fueled by a conviction that private property rights would promote economic efficiency. Governments and international agencies hoped that privatizing factories and commercial firms would reinvigorate the economy, in part by streamlining the labor force and adjusting managerial hierarchies. Virtually all the research done in the early 1990s on economic reorganization was conducted among influential entrepreneurs, Western economists, and politicians invested in the processes of privatization. These studies told us very little, however, about the processes of transformation actually underway because they focused on plans, expectations, and projections of future performance. ⁸ How one went about privatizing a socialist factory—changing the way people worked, were paid, were disciplined—was outside their purview. Elizabeth Dunn righted this lopsided focus by choosing to work on the shop floor of one of the first Polish firms to be privatized, Alima—a baby food factory purchased by the American Gerber company. ⁹

Dunn’s research was inspired by the anthropological approach to political economy: a sustained, theoretically informed, and empirically grounded investigation of the relations of politics and economy in which issues of cultural history and the social making of persons is at the core of the analysis. So studying a factory in the mid-1990s meant paying attention to challenges to workers’ identity that the process of privatization entailed as much as challenges that managers faced in modernizing equipment and securing capital for expansion. She stood for hours on the production line affixing labels, unjamming bottlenecks, and making sure that jars of baby food were properly sealed. She chanced conversations with her fellow workers amidst the din, but over time, she enjoyed more favorable circumstances for casual conversation when invited to workers’ homes for a meal. Dunn also befriended white-collar workers in the sales force and in the HR department. Eventually, she conducted formal interviews with high-level managers, government officials, and journalists.

Privatizing socialist assets was considered the first step needed to transform the economy, which had been decimated by flawed economic policies at odds with capitalist practices. ¹⁰ This view betrayed a pervasive misunderstanding about socialist production in the 1980s. Socialist industry was crippled by worn-down machinery and difficulties with supply chains, but in many respects, it shared the same modern organizational techniques found in capitalist factories. Dunn’s contribution to the study of privatization was to move beyond the simple focus on titles to ownership and new entrepreneurial personalities to consider just how innovations proposed by the new managers fit into long-standing practices already in place. In other words, she did not treat the newly privatized factory as a blank slate but as a complex social world into which changes had to be assimilated. The manner in which managers and workers worked out these complex negotiations explained why privatizing ownership did not radically transform production overnight and how and why the specific changes that did occur happened as they did.

Dunn’s close attention to the everyday processes of privatization led her to consider the role of accounting and audit practices more closely than she might have before she entered the field. ¹¹ Her insights into these mundane practices have been extremely valuable, as they have become increasingly significant in postsocialist debates. ¹² Her analysis of accounting was not limited to examining changes in wage scales or quality control measures. She explored the intensely moral dimension of accounting and accountability. Both sides of the ledger—the responsibilities of workers and managers—had to be added into the balance to appreciate relationships in and out of work. Workers were held responsible to do their jobs, as were managers, but workers also believed that they could and should hold managers accountable for their actions. This dimension of accountability—the moral imperative of interpersonal interaction—is missing in scholarly treatments of privatization. Of course, this neglect mirrored practices on the ground. The interests and needs of workers were rarely taken into account when a factory was being sold; promises were frequently broken once the new owner took possession. Dunn’s attention to the reciprocal obligations of management and workers as participants in privatization was a welcome change.

Dunn’s analysis makes very clear that, in the factory, class position was not a given but actively created, assigned, and inculcated. A strong generational dynamic was also at play. Transnational corporations and Polish managers together fashioned these new social identities. The idea that young managers were somehow dynamic and innovative and suited for capitalism while blue-collar workers were old and stuck in the past was an idea that Alima-Gerber explicitly gave both to workers, through employee training, and to customers, through advertising. It also became quite clear that the “shock therapy transition,” in which valuable state assets were given away to foreign companies or to the socialist-era nomenklatura, was not necessary or predetermined. Changes in ownership did not produce a successful capitalist enterprise. They did, however, serve political interests—a policy decision that bred widespread dissatisfaction among the working class.

The theoretical contributions of Dunn’s analysis address three concerns. The first is the question of subjectivity or personhood. Her analysis reveals that personhood is an on-going achievement, a process that unfolds over time under the influence of complex social forces. The second considers the cultural consequences of metrics and standardization in factory practices—that is, wage norms, product design, and quality control—that reconfigure notions of time, effort, and materiality. The third contribution is Dunn’s insistence that we study accounting practices as both numerical exercises and moral claims.

Domesticating Revolution (1997)

The collectivization of agricultural production in Eastern Europe was a signature event of early socialism. A crucial feature of industrial policy, collectivization was intended to reduce the labor needed for agriculture, thereby freeing villagers to join the industrial labor force. We speak of the phenomenon in the singular, yet the character of collectivization varied significantly from country to country. Poland and Yugoslavia never undertook full-scale collectivization drives, and in other countries histories of prior land reform (or its absence) played an important role in dispossession, as did the role of agrarian political parties in the national landscape prior to World War II. After 1989, decollectivization was also understood to follow a singular logic; land was to be returned to its original owners to work the property as they wished, though this practice, too, varied from country to country. Driven by national ideologues whose ties to rural communities were tenuous at best, decollectivization aimed to dismantle socialist institutions in the countryside and undermine the influence of socialist officials in local affairs. Ideologues—national or international—were blinded by a faith in the magic of property ownership to reinvigorate the economy, believing forty years of socialist agricultural practice could be quickly abandoned. They were willfully ignorant of the vast changes in the organization of agricultural production at the village level, in which socialist farms had become closely intertwined with second economy activities, achieving what Gerald Creed refers to as “conflicting complementarity.” ¹³ Indeed, as Creed argues, throughout the socialist period villagers had been active participants in restructuring the agrarian economy. Creed conducted his initial field work between January 1987 and November 1988 in Zamfirovo, a village located in western Bulgaria. The timing of his field work was auspicious. He spent a couple of years living in what we have come to call late socialism, and he returned in the early years of the transition, making it possible to witness decollectivization first hand over the next decade.

The initial response of villagers in Zamfirovo to decollectivization efforts was to strengthen their commitment to socialist institutions. Creed skillfully explains why this otherwise surprising response made perfect sense to the people in Zamfirovo. Originally collectivization arrived unwanted in the village and was widely resisted. But in the ensuing forty years, mechanization substantially reduced the drudgery once common among those working the land. Other important social changes also had an effect. A strong wave of outmigration and changes in the demographic profile of the community altered the village’s composition; state policy encouraging the dispersal of industrial development in rural areas brought alternative means of employment to villagers. Most importantly in relation to the structure of agricultural production, second economy activities developed as a supplement and complement to large-scale production on the collective farm. Villagers thrived by interweaving their informal activities in and around the formal institutions of the collective farm and the Communist Party. Drawing on the resources made available in the formal economy permitted them the flexibility to transform the local economy to their advantage. In short, Zamfirovo no longer resembled the community it had been at the end of World War II. Creed emphasizes that these changes were not the result of active resistance to the regime but were in fact possible precisely because villagers complied with authorities. Compliance can be as transformative as resistance, but it is rarely recognized as such. Villagers’ responses to decollectivization were mixed, fearing that the delicate balance they had achieved in village affairs was threatened. They were right.

Decollectivization of landed property was complicated. Some problems, such as changes in the physical landscape, were simple and could have been anticipated. ¹⁴ Large-scale cultivation of extensive grain fields erased markings that had previously delineated properties from one another; structures built to serve the cooperative, such as stables, pigsties, and managerial offices, were built on land slated for repossession. Other difficulties were faced when villagers quarreled over the relative value of new private plots. Those who had owned a vineyard balked when given a simple plot of land to cultivate grain. Another strange oversight of those advocating decollectivization was the neglect of economies of scale. In 1945, most peasants had owned very little land, and what they did own was scattered in tiny plots around a village. In Zamfirovo, these tiny plots averaged in total about three acres. Collectivization had amalgamated these plots into the size of fields that were viable on a modern, mechanized farm. That economy of scale was being destroyed by parceling out land in tiny bits and pieces. Returning land to a family did not gift them with a viable economic enterprise; it doomed them to penury or forced them back into subsistence production. Villagers feared having to return to the arduous manual labor of working the land. Mechanization was out of the question, both because machines owned by the cooperative were not designed to work small plots and the villagers could not afford to buy machinery. To expand cultivation, one needed to secure monies and hire labor, but neither of these resources was easy to come by. Loans were difficult to get because villagers rarely had sufficient collateral and interest rates were exorbitant. The second economy in the 1980s may have fattened villagers’ pockets, but people never accrued enough capital to finance a modern farm operation.

The bureaucratic procedures required to facilitate restitution constituted another barrier to decollectivization. Documents required to prove ownership claims had to be collected, often from multiple government offices requiring that people travel long distances to find them. In some cases, documentation was simply unavailable. Relying on the memories of older villagers may have helped in some cases, but in others conflicting accounts merely fed long-standing disagreements between families over the location of their properties. It is not easy to settle a dispute even if documentation is available because the veracity of official papers can be called into question. Land laws were constantly changing, confusing villagers and frustrating the land commission’s task. The uncertainty surrounding legal terms made it much easier for people to engage in questionable transactions and other forms of corruption. It is not surprising, therefore, that faced with the prospect of liquidating the farm, villagers expressed their preference for collective production.

In October 1992, a new socialist cooperative comprising 1,300 hectares was established, composed of lands volunteered by 800 villagers. It was not viable in the long term. Villagers faced the exorbitant cost of basic inputs to production: seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel. National policies for and against decollectivization contributed to the chaos generated by decollectivization. Creed makes this very clear. “Thus, while the [Union of Democratic Forces]’s attempt to eliminate cooperatives actually strengthened them, the [Bulgarian Socialist Party]’s economic inertia, intended in part to sustain socialist economic institutions, eventually undermined the viability of cooperatives. Both strategies backfired.” ¹⁵

Creed’s argument about conflicting complementarity is thought-provoking. He insists that we appreciate the transformative power of compliance. Villagers developed strategies to build a viable collective, weaving complex connections over time between public and private production to great advantage. These strategies were threatened by decollectivization, and when the state withdrew its support from agrarian communities, the tactics could no longer sustain the collective. Creed’s study also underscores the class politics driving national policy initiatives. Decollectivization was pursued as part of a larger strategy to change the guard, to replace elites beholden to the Communist Party with a new cadre of managers and leaders. It had little to do with the actual economics of farming or the needs of collective farm workers themselves.

Politics in Color and Concrete (2013)

Steel workers stoking a furnace, proud kerchiefed women driving tractors, earnest engineers surveying new bridge construction—familiar images in socialist magazines. Look closer, and one sees an ad for a new furniture set and, on the next page, an advice column on the latest trends in home decoration. Why pay attention to these simple trappings of domestic life when coverage of the recent Communist Party Congress blanketed national newspapers? Who cares about DIY projects when economic reforms are making it possible to start a business? Krisztina Fehérváry did. She argues convincingly in her book, Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary, that the aesthetics of home décor were as central to the class politics of socialism as class warfare directed against kulaks or petty bourgeois shop owners. ¹⁶

No matter how often I raised the issue, Hungarian intellectuals in the 1990s balked at any talk of class analysis, dismissing it as the tired rhetoric of the socialist era. And yet, as Fehérváry demonstrates in her engaging ethnography, “the renewed salience of class and its representation in prestige-oriented consumption were inescapable features of the postsocialist 1990s.” ¹⁷ Billboards advertising new suburban housing construction flanked highways; kitchen upgrades with marble counters and fashionable appliances were the talk of the town. One could easily have viewed this fascination with upward mobility as the direct consequence of a new capitalist economy, but Fehérváry situated it within a longer history of aspirations fostered by the socialist state to improve and modernize Hungarians’ lifestyle. This approach was grounded in a theoretical commitment to examining “the interpenetration of politics and materialities, particularly of the multitude of meanings and affective powers embedded in the qualities of lived space.” ¹⁸ Fehérváry illustrates her thesis by describing a series of aesthetic regimes that characterized consumption practices during the socialist period, arguing that being able to furnish one’s apartment in the latest fashion was central to socialist economic policy and the Communist party’s claim to legitimacy.

The site of Fehérváry’s field work was Dunaújváros, a town situated on the Danube about 80 km south of Budapest. Once known as Sztálinváros, the town was built in the 1950s to serve a new steel mill—a gargantuan effort demonstrating the power of socialist industrial development. The apartments constructed to house the working class were designed according to the newest standards. This was a working-class town, a proud emblem of socialist modernity unburdened by the decadent bourgeois palaces that graced Budapest’s main avenues. The field work that Fehérváry conducted was divided between study in national and local archives, on one hand, and interviews and informal conversations, on the other hand. She conducted interviews with city officials, journalists, bank and cooperative housing managers, and officials at the steel mill. Friends introduced her to friends, and eventually she was able to visit eighty homes in the town. These encounters taught her about contemporary affairs; she learned about home furnishings and design during the socialist period by surveying socialist print media, film, television shows, ads, newspapers, and home furnishing and women’s magazines. On this basis, she identified five distinct “aesthetic regimes” characterized not by decades or political eras, but by the distinct material qualities they embodied and the affective responses they elicited in customers (all of these styles are illustrated in color and black-and-white photos accompanying the text). Reviewing these materials was an inspired move because Fehérváry was able to complement the well-known ideological debates about socialist consumption with actual magazine copy designed to promote products, giving us an entirely different perspective on the manner in which aspiring to a modern socialist lifestyle was portrayed to the average citizen. Contrary to the usual depiction of socialist products as unfashionable, the styles displayed were right in step with the most modern trends in Western design. The execution of these fashionable trends in socialist factories, however, fell far short of the state’s promises. This was also true of the mass-produced housing design so familiar across the region; panel apartments became iconic of the failure of state socialist modernity. The “Organicist Modern” vernacular aesthetic of late socialism—a style using materials and forms from the natural world and encouraging DIY creativity—was clearly a response to the uniformity and concrete materiality of panel apartments. By the 1990s, Organicist Modern décor was commercialized and commodified, becoming the look of the new middle classes in Hungary.

Fehérváry’s study contributes to recent work in anthropology focusing on the crucial role of material conditions and the spatial dimensions of everyday life. ¹⁹ How and where we live are definitive features of social life, with profound economic, political, and cultural import. Fehérváry’s research demonstrated how the experience of living in panel housing was bound up with how people understood the state and their relationship to it as citizens; socialist political subjectivity was fashioned under these conditions. Fehérváry’s project also calls our attention to studies of affect in politics; a cold and impersonal apartment felt wrong. The experience of living with this socialist modernist aesthetic—and its failures—reinforced the negative impression of the socialist state as impersonal, rational, bureaucratic, and anti-national.

Anthropologists’ Contribution

These brief snapshots of four rich ethnographies demonstrate the strengths of social analysis that anthropology offers. Anthropologists seek out the people whose lives they wish to understand. They usually travel to places far away from home, believing that the experience of living alongside the people whose lives they wish to chronicle is imperative. But as Joan Scott has argued, personal experience is not an epistemological warrant; sustained self-criticism is required to move beyond one’s limited view to be able to entertain conflicting accounts as seriously as one’s own. ²⁰ What being there does offer is the possibility of being actively engaged in the community. Anthropologists become apprentices, keen to learn and quick to pose questions or elicit opinions from people on the spot. They develop close relations with families and witness the full range of activities people engage in day in and day out. Developing intimate relationships with people also means that the emotional register of social change is ever present. Sharing so much time with friends and acquaintances means one can ask why questions and even dare to challenge openly what one hears, provoking people to explain themselves in ways they had never been called on to do. The meaning of people’s behavior itself becomes a topic of conversation. This wealth of material is eventually incorporated into the analytic narrative one crafts after returning from the field, enhancing one’s theoretical argument with cultural and emotional depth.

The main actors in the literature on the transition of the 1990s were politicians, dissidents, bankers, foreign advisors, and academics. The ethnographies I have described here introduce us to people who, in my mind, were just as important in the transition as elites, but who have been overlooked. In the early 1990s, people spent hours debating who might have been responsible for the transition. Was it Gorbachev? Reagan? Havel? These were senseless exercises because arguing for one or another of these leaders required one to flesh out all the people and all the events that made their crucial roles possible. My response was always: what about all the other people who had lived in socialism? They built cities, worked on cooperative farms, sold refrigerators, and tolerated Soviet border guards. And as all of these accounts demonstrate, the cumulative actions of everyday folk over forty years altered socialist societies in profound ways. We cannot forget what they did and how hard it was. This is not populist drivel. Social theory and the study of historical change have taught us that the dynamic quality of social life is firmly grounded in mundane, everyday actions. It is the task of the anthropologist, and social scientists more generally, to recognize just how and why those actions change over time. We can provide a satisfactory account only if we pay attention to the lives of average folk as much as we do to those of elites.

In this forum, we are pausing to commemorate the anniversaries of momentous events. Those of us who study the societies and cultures of eastern Europe have been witness to the enormous changes that have ensued, and each in our small way has attempted to make sense of it all. We have beheld breathtaking acts of courage and grieved over heartbreaking tales of treachery and ruin. As anthropologists, we have lived and worked with people who had to reckon with these epochal shifts day in and day out, making do in the most difficult of circumstances. What did it all mean to those who were tossed about in the whirlwind? Why did what happened happen? We told their stories as best we could, and along the way we demonstrated that social life is a process in time, that mundane acts have consequences, that personhood is a dynamic social activity, that our material environment is politically and culturally significant, and that class matters.